Android is a dead end

So while Microsoft didn’t do itself any favors, I’d argue strongly that all these machinations and flailings weren’t a response (or weren’t only a response) to the iPhone. The real enemy was the company that had set its sights on Microsoft’s phone ambitions since before the iPhone was released.

That company was Google, of course, and it only tangentially wanted to take on the iPhone. Google’s real target was always Microsoft, and it hit the bullseye.

This article looks at the past, so let me take this opportunity to posit something that might come as a surprise to some.

Android is a dead end.

I really want to write a far more detailed and in-depth article explaining why I think Android is a dead end, but I can’t yet fully articulate my thoughts or pinpoint why, exactly, I’ve felt like this for months now. All this doesn’t mean Google is going to get out of mobile operating systems, and it doesn’t even mean that the name “Android” is going away. All it means is that what we think of today as “Android” – a Linux kernel with libraries, the Android Runtime, and so on on top – has served its hackjob, we-need-to-compete purpose and is going to go away.

Android in its current form suffers from several key architectural problems – it’s not nearly as resource-efficient as, say, iOS, has consistent update problems, and despite hefty hardware, still suffers from the occasional performance problems, among other things – that Google clearly hasn’t been able to solve. It feels like Android is in limbo, waiting for something, as if Google is working on something else that will eventually succeed Android.

Is that something Fuchsia? Is Project Treble part of the plan, to make it easier for Google to eventually replace Android’s Linux base with something else? If Android as it exists today was salvageable, why are some of the world’s greatest operating systems engineers employed by Google not working on Android, but on Fuchsia? If Fuchsia is just a research operating system, why did its developers recently add actual wallpapers to the repository? Why does every design choice for Fuchsia seem specifically designed for and targeted at solving Android’s core problems?

I don’t like making broad predictions based on gut feelings and spidey senses, since they can be incredibly misleading and hard to read, but I’m still pretty confident on this one: over the coming two to three years, Android will undergo a radical transformation. This transformation will be mostly transparent to users – their next Android phone won’t actually be “Android” anymore, but still run the same applications, and they literally won’t care – but it won’t be a Linux device, and it won’t suffer from Android’s core problems.

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What you are perceiving is a side effect of the Oracle litigation. If Oracle was out of the picture Chromebooks would fully embrace Android apps. The Chromebook world would become a windowed Android system and a lot of innovation would occur. But the Oracle litigation prevents Google form doing much in that direction.

If that world was allowed to exist (Oracle is stopping it) XWindows might wither away and Linux users would switch onto this new GUI system. I’d love to develop Android apps as if they were native apps.

Updating Android is an orthogonal issue. Google should just lay down the law and tell their OEMs to mainline their kernel code or no Android license. Then Google would be able to build their images and push updates to the devices. The OS is not the problem, vendors closing up source code is real problem. Then when the vendor fails to act no one can do it for them.

Google should just lay down the law and tell their OEMs to mainline their kernel code or no Android license.

Google has almost no power to control anyone. The majority of Android devices (the Chinese market) don’t use Google services. Their is also nothing stoppkng the big OEMs from forking Android or replacing the Google sevices with another suite of services. (MS could even produce their own version of Android with Hotmail, Here Maps, Bing etc.)

(MS could even produce their own version of Android with Hotmail, Here Maps, Bing etc.)

They actually have dabbled into that, in a way at least. When they had sent Ellop over to Nokia, there was the Nokia X series, based on AOSP with a Windows Phone skin, Microsoft services and apps and no Google Play Services or Google Play Store.

(MS could even produce their own version of Android with Hotmail, Here Maps, Bing etc.)

They actually have dabbled into that, in a way at least. When they had sent Ellop over to Nokia, there was the Nokia X series, based on AOSP with a Windows Phone skin, Microsoft services and apps and no Google Play Services or Google Play Store.

Google has almost no power to control anyone. The majority of Android devices (the Chinese market) don’t use Google services. Their is also nothing stoppkng the big OEMs from forking Android or replacing the Google sevices with another suite of services. (MS could even produce their own version of Android with Hotmail, Here Maps, Bing etc.)

The ignorance must be bliss. By the way, do you know Jack? Google Play Services is the control. Why do you think no phone has ever succeeded without it outside of China? Why do you think those Chinese OEM’s quickly install Google Play Services the second they try to sell their phones outside of China? Google Play store and the rest of the Google apps are all of the control Google needs to make those OEM’s do whatever Google wants them to do.

“If Oracle was out of the picture Chromebooks would fully embrace Android apps. The Chromebook world would become a windowed Android system”

I was at Google I/O this year, and this is exactly what was presented at the “Android Apps on ChromeOS” session. In fact, I’ve been using the flagship device for this approach (the Samsung Chromebook Pro) for almost a month now. And my take-away is this:

Android as an OS is at this point is more complete, usable, and mature than ChromeOS. Given a choice between a Chrome app and an Android app, the Android app is always better. Android properly handles high density screens, ChromeOS is still limping along on hacks. Android handles touch better, Android is a better tablet OS. Android, as of Nougat, is a better window manager.

I like the Chromebook Pro as a device, but having come to it from a Pixel C, my frequent wish is “why doesn’t this thing just run pure Android.”

I still think that ChromeOS + Android has value, because ChromeOS has a huge presence in the education market, and can be managed in a classroom in ways that Android currently can’t, but as an general OS for an all-in-one device, Android doesn’t need ChromeOS.

Oracle’s bid for a new trial at the US District Court for the Northern District of California was knocked back in September. Oracle said it deserved a new trial because Google “completely concealed the ARC++ project” to bring Android apps to Chrome OS hardware.

Given that they gave up on C++ frameworks when they pivoted Brillo into Android Things, and that Fuchsia uses Dart for user space, this should give you an hit what Google teams think about supporting something like the NDK.

By constrained I mean only the APIs listed on NDK documentation are allowed to be used on NDK applications, and Google has removed UNIX IPC, as well as all the Linux syscalls or POSIX support that they don’t consider relevant for their goals of how the NDK should be used.

By killing the application, I mean that starting with Android N and further improved on Android O, if Android notices that the application is trying to link into APIs not part of the official NDK documentation, it will be terminated.

There is the mobile site if you need it. I personally detest all mobile sites when using my phone to surf the web and only want the desktop version. I have to use several ugly hoops to make sure no mobile sites is ever shown on my end.

I personally detest all mobile sites when using my phone to surf the web and only want the desktop version.

I actually want to go the opposite direction and have mobile versions of sites load on my desktop. (Well, not the ones that are more like apps, but the content-centric sites.) The mobile versions seem to have all the content I came for, with 10x less crap on top.

This is a weird post by Thom. He’s made the case that the most popular mobile OS running Linux won’t be Linux anymore, but if Android changes it’s kernel and subsystem, it’ll still be Android if it has the same UX and still runs dex apps (and probably NDK apps). I’m not really sure why the need to claim Android is somehow going away here… It does make the case that kernels are a commodity.

I’d assume the article is suggesting that the current implementation of Android (based on Linux) is a dead end (and will be replaced by a new implementation, based on Fuschia).

The fact is that the Linux kernel isn’t ideal for multiple reasons; including GPL (phone manufacturers want closed source drivers that don’t break when the kernel is updated, and have been doing “drivers in user-space on a monolithic kernel that was never designed for drivers in user-space” as an ugly work-around); and including the fact that Linux was designed for *nix servers (lots of fluff that doesn’t make sense for smartphone and things like power management retro-fitted as an afterthought).

Nothing will continue to exist as it does today. If it does it will end up like OS/2, BeOS, RiscOS, etc.

I’m sure Android has technical issues, but I’m not sure I’d take your opinion on what they are. No offence, but it would take some one with a deeper understanding of internals to adequately explain. I suspect it has more to do with policy, than anything else. Apple started from a default answer of NO, where as android was a YES. Its much more difficult to impose necessary restrictions after the fact than before.

In a few years, Google’s Pixel phone will have a fully custom, Google-designed SoC, and run an operating system that is Android in brand name only.

Depending on what you mean by “a few”, I’d argue that Google’s concern is that Android’s good enough for phones for now, but that it doesn’t provide them with enough headroom for IoT and ubiquitous computing. For me, that’s what they’re really aiming at with projects like Fuchsia. By the time that stuff hits the market, the smartphone hopefully won’t already be a silly relic of the past.

Android is (and always was) inconceivably shitty OS for a device as critical as phone. It is slow, unreliable, insecure, unstable, inconsistent and is getting more and more retarded limitations (such as not allowing apps to enable “airplane mode”, removing USB Mass Storage mode etc.). It trashes phone’s battery like there’s no tomorrow, constantly doing shit in the background no one asked it to do, scanning environment using all the possible radios it can find on the device, leaving actual user needs at the very end of it’s priority scale.

And you know what is most appalling? There aren’t any real alternatives. Well, I guess you could count iOS as an alternative… Maybe. But apart from that, if you need a reliable phone that actually does what you want it to do (and not what it’s mothership asks it to do) the only alternative is to get a dumbphone.

You have alternatives.. It’s called a desktop / laptop with whatever you want to install on it.

I am talking about phones, and you offer me desktop computer as an alternative? WTF is wrong with you? It’s as if I was looking for a shovel and you would offer me plasma screen TV.

The one and only reason why I am forced to use smartphone and not my beloved dumbphone is that I need to have access to taxi services such as Uber, Taxify etc. in my pocket. Regular old fashioned call-ordered taxi is too limited and often does not have enough cars in my area. I fail to imagine how would a desktop, or even a laptop computer would help me in this case.

You could feasibly get one of the Samsung Gear S2/3 watches with 4G. Though I am not sure if there is a way to side load apps onto them without a smartphone, but they have uber apps and such for them, can handle your calls (through the watch or bluetooth headphones) and you could even feasibly send/receive messages from them.

You could feasibly get one of the Samsung Gear S2/3 watches with 4G. Though I am not sure if there is a way to side load apps onto them without a smartphone, but they have uber apps and such for them, can handle your calls (through the watch or bluetooth headphones) and you could even feasibly send/receive messages from them.

They are Tizen based instead of Android.

What?.. Just… What??? Do you have some kind of weird sense of humor? Or are you trying to make fun of me in some weird way with these totally random and unrelated suggestions?

Android is (and always was) inconceivably shitty OS for a device as critical as phone. It is slow, unreliable, insecure, unstable, inconsistent and is getting more and more retarded limitations (such as not allowing apps to enable “airplane mode”, removing USB Mass Storage mode etc.). It trashes phone’s battery like there’s no tomorrow, constantly doing shit in the background no one asked it to do, scanning environment using all the possible radios it can find on the device, leaving actual user needs at the very end of it’s priority scale.

And you know what is most appalling? There aren’t any real alternatives. Well, I guess you could count iOS as an alternative… Maybe. But apart from that, if you need a reliable phone that actually does what you want it to do (and not what it’s mothership asks it to do) the only alternative is to get a dumbphone.

Perhaps you should stop using cheap and shitty Chinese phones. Android has already proven to be more efficient than iOS. Just look the recent PhoneBuff speed test between the OnePlus 5 and the iPhone 7 Plus. The OP5 costs half as much, has a weaker CPU and slower storage and it still beats the iPhone 7 Plus.

Whatever happened to the iPhone 7 Plus being so efficient? It can’t even render video properly and handily gets beaten by a OP5 and Pixel XL.

You know what I think? I think you’re one of those disgruntled little Microsoft fanboys that can’t accept the fact that their phone platform is dead. You probably still use that piece of garbage windows phone because you’re so loyal to MS and, of course, apps don’t really matter, right?

Perhaps you should stop using cheap and shitty Chinese phones. [/q] I have always used only top of the line phones: Galaxy S II, Galaxy S7 Edge and HTC’s most expensive ones.

Android has already proven to be more efficient than iOS. Just look the recent PhoneBuff speed test between the OnePlus 5 and the iPhone 7 Plus. The OP5 costs half as much, has a weaker CPU and slower storage and it still beats the iPhone 7 Plus.

Did I ever say iOS is considerably better? No. I said iOS might be considered an alternative, but it’s quite a shitty alternative, too. It’s more of a matter of taste: you can choose between crap and shit.

Whatever happened to the iPhone 7 Plus being so efficient? It can’t even render video properly and handily gets beaten by a OP5 and Pixel XL.

You are so clueless, it hurts. Let me tell you what I mean: my current Android smartphone, CAT S60, used to last for about 2 days out-of-box. Then I started removing all the crap I could, disabled all the shit that is completely useless for me as a user, installed an app that watches OS activity and (very) aggressively kicks the butt of any app, activity or feature that decides to wake up for no reason and do some shit no one asked it to do. Now my phone lasts for 11 days on a single charge! Do you see just how retarded you look now with all your benchmarks and comparisons?

[q]You know what I think? I think you’re one of those disgruntled little Microsoft fanboys that can’t accept the fact that their phone platform is dead. You probably still use that piece of garbage windows phone because you’re so loyal to MS and, of course, apps don’t really matter, right?

Microsoft? Ar you totally retarded? I have never even tried any Microsoft phone in my life. Just by this totally made up comment you have proven to be a huge Android fanboy yourself. And quite a butt-hurt one, I might say… Because you have to be seriously butt-hurt to make up such hilarious conclusions from thin air.

Did I ever say iOS is considerably better? No. I said iOS might be considered an alternative, but it’s quite a shitty alternative, too. It’s more of a matter of taste: you can choose between crap and shit. [/q]

If you consider Android and iOS shit, I can only imagine the sewage waste of a phone you must use. Oh, wait you use a CAT S60 so you must work with sewage directly. I guess your attitude comes from ingesting a bit of it everyday.

I don’t need any video, I have used Android first-hand long enough on several most expensive and most powerful smartphones on the planet.

You really should watch it because it puts into perspective just how igonorant your comments really are. How exactly is a phone with a slower CPU, a slower GPU and slower storage beat an iPhone that has faster components? Efficiency. It also helps that iOS apps have become more bloated by the year.

You are so clueless, it hurts. Let me tell you what I mean: my current Android smartphone, CAT S60, used to last for about 2 days out-of-box. Then I started removing all the crap I could, disabled all the shit that is completely useless for me as a user, installed an app that watches OS activity and (very) aggressively kicks the butt of any app, activity or feature that decides to wake up for no reason and do some shit no one asked it to do. Now my phone lasts for 11 days on a single charge! Do you see just how retarded you look now with all your benchmarks and comparisons?

You’re a liar. Do you really think we’re going to believe you extended the battery life of a phone with a 3800 mAh battery from 2 days to 11 days by disabling apps. No, what an idiot like you did was to reduce his phone usage to almost zero and place it in standby mode the majority of it’s time.

[q]

Microsoft? Ar you totally retarded? I have never even tried any Microsoft phone in my life. Just by this totally made up comment you have proven to be a huge Android fanboy yourself. And quite a butt-hurt one, I might say… Because you have to be seriously butt-hurt to make up such hilarious conclusions from thin air.

The thing that ejected you probably was because the IQ was certainly passed onto you. Also, let’s make one thing very clear, the only one butt hurt here is you because someone stood up to a cantankerous old POS like you and put you in your place.

If you consider Android and iOS shit, I can only imagine the sewage waste of a phone you must use. Oh, wait you use a CAT S60 so you must work with sewage directly. I guess your attitude comes from ingesting a bit of it everyday. [/q] Oh wow, so much arguments, so logical and clever 😀 You clearly have nothing to say, apart from plain insults.

You really should watch it because it puts into perspective just how igonorant your comments really are. How exactly is a phone with a slower CPU, a slower GPU and slower storage beat an iPhone that has faster components? Efficiency. It also helps that iOS apps have become more bloated by the year.

Why in the world would I ever care about Android vs. iOS comparisons?

You’re a liar. Do you really think we’re going to believe you extended the battery life of a phone with a 3800 mAh battery from 2 days to 11 days by disabling apps. No, what an idiot like you did was to reduce his phone usage to almost zero and place it in standby mode the majority of it’s time.

Ahaha, you now resorted to denial (I suppose the truth is too shocking for you if you have to do that) 😀

Note, this was taken while my optimization was still in progress, so battery life now improved even further.

My phone usability is absolutely fine and is in no way “reduced” as far as I am concerned. I don’t need Facebooks, Instagrams, GPS, WiFi scanning, Google’s telemetry and other similar crap.

[q]The thing that ejected you probably was because the IQ was certainly passed onto you. Also, let’s make one thing very clear, the only one butt hurt here is you because someone stood up to a cantankerous old POS like you and put you in your place.

You sound so “mature”, I will make an educated guess that you are most likely between 12 and 14 years old.

Note, this was taken while my optimization was still in progress, so battery life now improved even further.

My phone usability is absolutely fine and is in no way “reduced” as far as I am concerned. I don’t need Facebooks, Instagrams, GPS, WiFi scanning, Google’s telemetry and other similar crap.

I noticed you had no time on WiFi. Do you also turn your cell radio off every chance you get? You spend so much time trying to micromanage your battery that you might as well get a dumbphone as that probably suits your usecase better.

[q]

You sound so “mature”, I will make an educated guess that you are most likely between 12 and 14 years old.

Say, aren’t you the degenerate that started throwing around the “retarded” word? Was there really a need to try and project your mental condition onto others?

To put into perspective and context just how stupid your comments were. [/q] I’m sorry, but would you be able to finally explain HOW is that video comparison at all related to my comments? Furthermore, how is it supposed to “put them into perspective”? I’m not sure you even understand yourself what you are talking about.

I noticed you had no time on WiFi. Do you also turn your cell radio off every chance you get? You spend so much time trying to micromanage your battery that you might as well get a dumbphone as that probably suits your usecase better.

Well that is exactly what I had and really liked. And I would still use dumbphone-only, but unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I need access to taxi apps, such as Taxify, eTaxi etc. That is the one and only reason why I am forced to use this dreaded, awful parody of an operating system called Android.

[q]Say, aren’t you the degenerate that started throwing around the “retarded” word? Was there really a need to try and project your mental condition onto others?

You see, “retarded” was quite a measured and adequate conclusion to make after reading your comments. I did not make it up out of thin air as you did with “Microsoft fanboy” etc. You don’t want to be perceived as retarded 14-year old? Then don’t act like one.

I always look at when my phone is stable for alternative roms. I usually buy an older phone so I can flash it right away. I still need Gmail and calendar. But who needs Google Books, Google Movies, Google Play anyway?

Google has a strong hate-love relationship with Gnu/Linux. It made them rule the smartphone market, but it also made them weak in controlling what we are doing on that same phone.

Their biggest problem is that it is opensource (duh). They can use it, but not control it. Fuchsia might solve it. But don’t we get another iOS clone? I certainly don’t want to buy it. Hoping there are alternatives of other companies who keep android alive. Heck, maybe a Chinese branded phone will be a better option in the future.

That’s like to this day, there aren’t many systems that can get as tight a response on MIDI as the Atari ST can. Got to love the old systems, the OS seemed much more tightly integrated and optimized for the hardware.

Granted these days your hardware could be so many different combinations of things….

That’s the tradeoff. Going back to system-specific OSes and bare metal responsiveness means trashing 30+ years of application compatibility for DOS/Windows, and nearly 50 years for Unix-likes. Even most research OSes slap on a POSIX compatibility mode so they can leverage the vast bulk of open source software.

Android can be a horrid experience especially after dipping your toe in to the cesspit that is the Play portal.

get rid of all the google framework, better yet wipe the phone and never install it and you have a *much* faster experience with greater battery life, oh and if you care better privacy (but who cares about that these days)

I have had to provide some services on my own “cloud” (or web server as we used to call it) but there are lots and lots of alternatives out there with various pros and cons for all manner of services…

The google framework is not there for user benefit, rather for google to make money from your activity. Superficially it looks advantageous.

At least unlike the iphone, you can wipe you phone and replace vendor bloat ware with only the things you want…

Android can be a horrid experience especially after dipping your toe in to the cesspit that is the Play portal.

get rid of all the google framework, better yet wipe the phone and never install it and you have a *much* faster experience with greater battery life, oh and if you care better privacy (but who cares about that these days)

Yeah, right. If only it was that easy. I have CAT S60 (one of the very few modern smartphones that I can bear to live with) and it’s impossible to even root it, not even talking about removing Google’s crap… Heck, I am even prepared to PAY someone to root it and allow me to remove all the shitware from it, but so far no one is able to do that.

Ideally, the only data my phone should store is phone book, text messages and call logs. Of those 3, only phone book needs backup, and it should be done via USB cable to PC. You know, how people used to do it before “cloud” craze and shit.

App updating should be once-a-year activity, and also done via USB cable, along with OS updates.

IOW, you want a phone, not a pocket computer. Definitely a valid usecase.

Personally, I want less of a phone and more of a pocket computer. I’m still waiting for a landscape slider with modern specs to be released to make this a reality. I don’t want a media consumption device (which is what most slab phones are these days). I want a palm-sized computer that can replace all my other portable computers (tablet+keyboard case, netbook, laptop).

IOW, you want a phone, not a pocket computer. Definitely a valid usecase.

Personally, I want less of a phone and more of a pocket computer. I’m still waiting for a landscape slider with modern specs to be released to make this a reality. I don’t want a media consumption device (which is what most slab phones are these days). I want a palm-sized computer that can replace all my other portable computers (tablet+keyboard case, netbook, laptop).

IOW, you want a phone, not a pocket computer. Definitely a valid usecase.

Personally, I want less of a phone and more of a pocket computer. I’m still waiting for a landscape slider with modern specs to be released to make this a reality. I don’t want a media consumption device (which is what most slab phones are these days). I want a palm-sized computer that can replace all my other portable computers (tablet+keyboard case, netbook, laptop).

Actually I think the more important analogy is to the OTHER change that MS tried to ship at the same sort of time — the great .NET experiment.

Remember the POINT of .NET was to do exactly what Google presumably wants to do now: throw away the godawful legacy of the past and replace it with something architected for the future. And how did that play out?

So the real issue for Google, IMHO, is not details about the technology of the new OS, it is the extent to which they have the DESIRE and the CAPABILITY to do things differently from MS. In the case of MS, we had internal company antibodies that fought change (of any sort) tooth and nail, the many third parties who were, likewise, uninterested in change if it meant any sort of short-term pain, and a general philosophical belief in the user-base that preferred stasis (and all its problems) to change.

You could make much the same argument for Intel and EPIC.

So how is Google different? They probably have the same internal politics (perhaps not as bad as MS because more of Google are engineers and aware of how badly what they have sucks).

They certainly have the same user base that complains about any change whatsoever.

They have the same vendors allergic to change (and with more power in that they can do the equivalent of when the nascent PC industry rebelled against MCA and created EISA — they can fork ‘Open Android’ or whatever and all switch to using that).

Rapid change IS possible — but in the past it required a company like Apple that controlled the entire stack, that was willing to force short term pain on its customers for long-term gain, and that has created an expectation of constantly abandoning the past in its users and developers. (eg we expect to lose 32-bit iOS compatibility this year. Perhaps in two or three years, we’ll be seeing macOS switch to ARM).

The analogy really is with .NET, not with XP — XP is just like the usual annual Android update, eg bringing in ART. Hell, MS couldn’t really pull off the less extreme versions of this sort of switch in the form of Windows 8, or Windows RT, both of which eventually deteriorated into giving up or some sort of stupid compromise that’s an even bigger mess than when they started. (Do we land up with phones that are running Android on some cores, Fuchsia on others, a hypervisor underneath both, two different UIs — plus inconsistent skinning — and 4x the resource requirements of iOS?)

Fuschia will have Linux binary compatibility for the NDK and the usual VM for ART. Linux kernel binary compatibility isn’t exactly a hard thing if you have a dedicated loader for them – the BSDs have had it for years, and now Windows 10 does as well.

I am pretty geeky, but most people don’t really care WHAT OS is loaded on their phone. They just want to make calls, send texts, and have access to the apps they are used to.

So will it matter when Google moves from “Android” to “Fuchsia” or whatever they are going to call it? Not really…as long as the OS is compatible with the apps people are using, no one will really care what the OS is like behind the scenes.

Mobile was going to explode. Whether that’s MS and/or Google is irrelevant from Googles POV. In either case a big tech giant controls a relatively closed platform and acts as a gateway for software that is allowed on their mobile OS.

Google is mostly making money with search.

If MS and/or Apple control a large percentage of the market then they could easily (and eventually would) use their own search engine on mobile devices.

That would drastically limit Googles ability to compete.

And Android is not a dead end.

No sane company is going to dead-end the most successful mobile os of all time and replace it with something new. That would needlessly annoy both devs and customers and makes zero sense from Googles POV.

Sure they might replace the Linux Kernel with something else and they already are replacing old Java libs.

But all that will be gradual while slowly evolving the APIs that devs use.

Same for the UI. There won’t be a bg break – just gradual evolution.

Given enough time all OS and libs change gradually.

Windows is not the same system as 20 years ago – and neither is Linux.

And that genius programmers hack a new kernel (this time Fuchsia) doesn’t mean much. MS has done so for decades – but none of the experimental new kernels ever made it into real world OSs so far.

Perhaps Google replaces Linux – perhaps not.

And Android does not have a big resource problem compared to ios.

It runs suffiently efficient on cheap modern hardware- and that’s all a system ever needs to do.

All OSs have room for optimizations that are not realized because the risks of major rewrites don’t justify the gains.

I really want to write a far more detailed and in-depth article explaining why I think Android is a dead end

Maybe you should’ve done that rather than posted this.

but I can’t yet fully articulate my thoughts or pinpoint why, exactly, I’ve felt like this for months now

Well, that’s a great start for a technical polemic.

My guess is that the recent new book about the coming into being of Android at Google played some role.

All this doesn’t mean Google is going to get out of mobile operating systems, and it doesn’t even mean that the name “Android” is going away. All it means is that what we think of today as “Android” – a Linux kernel with libraries, the Android Runtime, and so on on top – has served its hackjob, we-need-to-compete purpose and is going to go away.

Actually this is a better start, but you don’t seem to believe so. Perhaps because it’s hard to prove these starting points are the case?

Android in its current form suffers from several key architectural problems

Now we get to the difficult parts.

First, define “architectural” and “key architectural”.

it’s not nearly as resource-efficient as, say, iOS,

Difficult to prove as they run on different hardware.

However it isn’t true for Linux and osx, so, we have some reason to think the issue isn’t with the kernel.

has consistent update problems

Absolutely. Also not only, or even primarily, at the feet of Android itself.

and despite hefty hardware

Not compared to what iOS uses when looking at single thread, parsing and DOM performance.

still suffers from the occasional performance problems

As does ios, but the pixel seems to have pretty much fixed these problems by using schedtune/eas. We’ll know more once that’s upstreamed and other oems integrate it.

among other things – that Google clearly hasn’t been able to solve

Remove “been able to”, add an “ed” to “solve”, and your point is better, but the pixel still appears to offer evidence to the contrary.

It feels like Android is in limbo, waiting for something, as if Google is working on something else that will eventually succeed Android

Maybe this should be in you diary?

Is that somethingÂ Fuchsia? IsÂ Project TrebleÂ part of the plan, to make it easier for Google to eventually replace Android’s Linux base with something else? If Android as it exists today was salvageable, why are some of the world’s greatest operating systems engineers employed by Google not working on Android,Â but on Fuchsia? If Fuchsia is just a research operating system, why did its developers recently addÂ actual wallpapers to the repository? Why does every design choice for Fuchsia seem specifically designed for and targeted at solving Android’s core problems?

There’s a lot here so I’ll just list a few things:

*Google likes to experiment (not sure why this needs to be said as they have a very long history of this)